Abstract
The landscape of central Tyrrhenian Italy became increasingly engraved with roads cut deep in the ground in the course of the seventh and sixth centuries bc. This development was mainly for pragmatic reasons, such as the need for better infrastructure and transport facilities resulting from increased vehicular traffic between and within regions. In addition to providing logistic benefits, road-cuttings also contributed to developing the socio-political aspects of the proto-urban centres of central Italy through their monumentality, which arguably was utilized in politicizing territorial landscapes as well as in enhancing funerary rituals. In this paper I shall examine road-cuttings as instruments of urbanization in iron age and Archaic central Italy by attempting to present a point of view in which the road-cuttings in central Italy are seen not only as pragmatic facilities, but also as building blocks of landscapes of power and identity. This goal is approached by using the methods of landscape archaeology and phenomenology in a study of 110 road-cuttings from central Italy and assessing their relations to their physical surroundings.
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